Hadiza Bala Usman Exposes Shipping Companies Cost Duplication Racket At Nigerian Ports
Hadiza Bala Usman
—Says Nigerian Importers Paying Twice for Same Service
By DAPO OLAWUNI
Special Adviser to the President on Policy and Coordination, Hadiza Bala Usman, has called out a duplication in Nigeria’s port charging system under which importers are made to pay twice for the same electronic cargo release service, once abroad and again locally to the same shipping company.
Bala Usman, who is also Head of the Central Results Delivery Coordination Unit, raised the example while delivering the keynote address at the 2026 Annual Lecture of the Maritime Reporters’ Association of Nigeria (MARAN) on Thursday, themed “Nigerian Ports: Ports Modernisation, Charges and the Competitiveness Question.”
The former Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) told the gathering that importers report paying roughly $50 abroad for a Telex Release, the electronic authorisation that allows cargo to be released without a physical bill of lading, only to be charged again locally, this time about N12,500, by the very same shipping company for what is functionally the same service already paid for.
She said she was not raising the case to single out any one operator, but because it captured precisely the kind of duplication that could be eliminated, unlike global freight rates, which remain genuinely outside domestic control.
She situated the example within a broader breakdown of how the cost of clearing cargo through Nigerian ports accumulates.
Citing figures from the Importers Association of Nigeria (IMAN) she noted that clearing a standard twenty-foot container through Apapa currently costs N15million, roughly double what it costs to clear the same container through the port of Cotonou just across Nigeria’s western border.
She said a shipper choosing between those two figures was not making a patriotic decision but an arithmetic one.
“Clearing a standard twenty-foot container through Apapa
currently costs in the region of fourteen to fifteen million naira, according to
the Importers Association of Nigeria (IMAN).
“The same container, cleared
through the port of Cotonou, just across our western border, costs roughly half
of that. A shipper choosing between those two numbers is not making a patriotic decision, they are making an arithmetic one
“Importers report paying somewhere in the region of forty-five to fifty dollars
abroad for a Telex Release.
This is the electronic authorisation that allows cargo to be released without a physical bill of lading.
“Importers are then charged
again, roughly twelve thousand five hundred naira, by the very same shipping
company, locally, for what is functionally the same service already paid for.
” I raise this not to single out one practice, but because it is exactly the kind of
duplication that we can consider eliminating unlike, for example, global freight
rates, which are genuinely outside anyone’s domestic control.
She was careful to distinguish this kind of avoidable duplication from the legitimate cost pressures shipping lines and terminal operators face, noting that operators have been absorbing genuine inflation, foreign exchange volatility, and the cost of running dollar-denominated equipment on a naira-denominated cost base.
She cited the recent tariff dispute in which shipping operators sought increases above one hundred per cent before the Nigerian Shippers’ Council settled on approximately thirty per cent, saying both sides had a case, the operators facing rising costs and importers facing a rising invoice they had no part in negotiating.
She challenged members of the Maritime Reporters Association of Nigeria (MARAN) to interrogate such charges with evidence, asking what a tariff actually finances and what the total cost of moving a container really is.
